The Roadblock of Culturalist Economics: Economic Change á la Douglass North

In his 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, North offers a rough account of economic change that can be called “culturalist economics.” In his account, he attributes the change of well being of individuals to, besides technology and demographics, cultural heritage or cultural beliefs. Using this basis, he then attributes "the mystery of the unique evolution of western Europe" to a causative view that combines "Christian dogma" and English "individualism." This combinatory belief assures property rights, and hence explains the success of Western Europe and the US and the failure of Islam and Latin America in terms of their respective economic development. But North’s culturalist economics faces a roadblock: it does not explain the origin of beliefs, and it neglects the role of rational choice in manufacturing beliefs. Specifically, it ignores the roles of agency, revolutionary change, and the dynamics of empire.cultural economics vs. culturalist economics; reification of culture; Christian dogma; individualism; mystery of rise of Europe; Islam

The Roadblock of Culturalist Economics: Economic Change á la Douglass North

In his 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, North offers a rough account of economic change that can be called “culturalist economics.” In his account, he attributes the change of well being of individuals to, besides technology and demographics, cultural heritage or cultural beliefs. Using this basis, he then attributes "the mystery of the unique evolution of western Europe" to a causative view that combines "Christian dogma" and English "individualism." This combinatory belief assures property rights, and hence explains the success of Western Europe and the US and the failure of Islam and Latin America in terms of their respective economic development. But North’s culturalist economics faces a roadblock: it does not explain the origin of beliefs, and it neglects the role of rational choice in manufacturing beliefs. Specifically, it ignores the roles of agency, revolutionary change, and the dynamics of empire

Multi-path Summation for Decoding 2D Topological Codes

Fault tolerance is a prerequisite for scalable quantum computing. Architectures based on 2D topological codes are effective for near-term implementations of fault tolerance. To obtain high performance with these architectures, we require a decoder which can adapt to the wide variety of error models present in experiments. The typical approach to the problem of decoding the surface code is to reduce it to minimum-weight perfect matching in a way that provides a suboptimal threshold error rate, and is specialized to correct a specific error model. Recently, optimal threshold error rates for a variety of error models have been obtained by methods which do not use minimum-weight perfect matching, showing that such thresholds can be achieved in polynomial time. It is an open question whether these results can also be achieved by minimum-weight perfect matching. In this work, we use belief propagation and a novel algorithm for producing edge weights to increase the utility of minimum-weight perfect matching for decoding surface codes. This allows us to correct depolarizing errors using the rotated surface code, obtaining a threshold of $17.76 \pm 0.02 \%$. This is larger than the threshold achieved by previous matching-based decoders ($14.88 \pm 0.02 \%$), though still below the known upper bound of $\sim 18.9 \%$.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, published in Quantum, available at https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2018-10-19-102

The Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility

This paper will be broken down into four sections. In §1, I try to assuage a worry that intellectual humility is not really an intellectual virtue. In §2, we will consider the two dominant accounts of intellectual humility in the philosophical literature—the low concern for status account the limitations-owing account—and I will argue that both accounts face serious worries. Then in §3, I will unpack my own view, the doxastic account of intellectual humility, as a viable alternative and potentially a better starting place for thinking about this virtue. And I’ll conclude in §4 by trying to defend the doxastic account against some possible objections

Determining rules for closing customer service centers: A public utility company's fuzzy decision

In the present work, we consider the general problem of knowledge acquisition under uncertainty. A commonly used method is to learn by examples. We observe how the expert solves specific cases and from this infer some rules by which the decision was made. Unique to this work is the fuzzy set representation of the conditions or attributes upon which the decision make may base his fuzzy set decision. From our examples, we infer certain and possible rules containing fuzzy terms. It should be stressed that the procedure determines how closely the expert follows the conditions under consideration in making his decision. We offer two examples pertaining to the possible decision to close a customer service center of a public utility company. In the first example, the decision maker does not follow too closely the conditions. In the second example, the conditions are much more relevant to the decision of the expert